Summary
As marketing and visitor engagement strategy demands new ways of catching visitors attention the use of video in web design has increased more and more. With modern technology it's incredibly easy to record, upload, and publish a video, however there are several things that must be considered in regards to accessibility that require some additional work and planning.
Using Audio
Where to Upload Audio
Audio can be uploaded directly to your website by adding it to the Media Library or uploaded to a third-party host such as Sound Cloud
Transcripts for Audio
To ensure that visitors with hearing disabilities are able to access audio content all (spoken) audio used on a website must have an accompanied transcript. Transcripts allow visitors who cannot access content from web audio to read a text transcript instead. Transcripts do not need to be word-for-word accounts of the audio, but should contain additional descriptions, explanations, or details that may be beneficial.
If you are unable to transcribe the audio yourself there are online transcription services available, and we recommend:
- Rev - Transcription (recommended)
Using Video
Where to Upload Videos
Due to the need for captioning all videos we strongly recommend uploading all videos to YouTube as their platform is easy to use.
To add a video to the CSU College of Liberal Arts YouTube account contact Nicolle McMurray and include the following:
- The video (or a shareable link to the video file in a cloud drive)
- Caption file (SubRip .srt file)
- Title
- Description
- Tags (optional)
Captioning Videos
To ensure that visitors with hearing disabilities are able to access the audio content within a video all videos must be captioned. There are several different methods available for captioning videos:
- Manually captioning a video using YouTubes video manager (subtitles/CC) using one of the following methods, both of which can be time-intensive:
- Caption from scratch, both writing the captions and syncing the timing of the words with the video.
- Upload a transcript file and sync the timing of the words with the video.
- Wait for YouTube to auto-caption the video and then go back through the entire video and make corrections. Making corrections is crucial as the auto-captioning process uses voice recognition technology and is generally inaccurate. This can delay your timeline as there is no timeframe given for when a video may be auto-captioned, if ever, and you still need to do quality control.
- Outsource to a third-party service to caption the video for you, which generally has a several day (or expedited for additional cost) turnaround time and range from $1 to $9 per minute of video. Be sure to request the captions in SubRip (.srt) caption file format:
- Rev - Captions (recommended)
- 3PlayMedia
- CaptionSync
As you can see, each of these options will require either some additional time investment or an additional cost, so planning for this when producing a video is critical to meeting a deadline and staying within budget.